


styx and stones

by endeofblood



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Caliginous Romance | Kismesis, F/F, F/M, Flushed Romance | Matesprits, Kissing, Multi, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Xenobiology, but it doesnt happen in the fic so thats why theres no archive warning, canon character death, gills work however you want them to... this is known, kinda some rough kissing ish? but nothing too exciting, with some quad flipping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 14:28:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15366672
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endeofblood/pseuds/endeofblood
Summary: Exchanges between orphaners and their heiresses often don’t require words; sometimes, apparently, squishy human scientists can be tucked neatly into the fold.





	styx and stones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thescyfychannel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescyfychannel/gifts).



> "Maybe they go out sailing together, maybe the water's calm enough to stop for a bit and swim in the ocean, maybe it's a brilliant day to be together?" -thescyfychannel

The surface of the ocean is perfectly opaque and smooth, like the surface of a pearl. Your small boat cuts through it, a blade through silk ribbon—it isn’t like any ocean you’d seen on Alternia, but the sky is a fair sight more familiar. Loops of glass, impossibly high and impossibly large, dominate the horizon like they had on your Land of Dew and Glass, curving with the slope of the dreambubble. The rigging of your boat is also something you aren’t familiar with, but Jade works over the ropes with quick, expert touches, correcting your course with a lean of her body weight and cord wrapped between her fingers. As far as you can tell, the ocean seems to stretch out endlessly in every direction—so you don’t really know if there’s a course to correct _to_ , and hell, you don’t even feel a breeze, but every time you point this out she just adjusts her wire-rim glasses and pretends she doesn’t hear you. Rude!  
  
Humans are so weird; your girl might be among the weirdest.  
  
Eridan is against your side—not quite a lean, but a press—his cute little godtier shoes stacked on top of each other over his lap, elbow resting on one thigh. His eyes reflect the same smoothness as the ocean, twin gems set into their sockets. You can’t follow his gaze any more than you were able to follow Sollux’s in life, but the slight incline of his head tells you that your prince is thinking hard about something, in that way he always seems to. His feet, like yours, are dangling into the water, no matter how much Jade had groused about drag.  
  
The irony of the only person on this boat _without_ fins being the one who knows how to pilot this thing is not lost on you.  
  
Far below you, there are darker shapes wrapped within the glassy-white water, with soft edges contorted by depth. Even with your enhanced vision, your slit-pupils expanding slightly to take in the fine details of the distorted shades, they don’t look much more like blocky rectangles and curved spheres. They must be what Eridan is watching, you reckon, and you aim a playful elbow between his fifth and sixth rib.  
  
“Ow, what the fuck.” He sounds thoroughly unwounded, though, the deflated lilt of his voice, sounding, like, sarcastic. You nearly follow up with a second jab, just to remind him that this is the same arm that towed every single whale he killed with that dumb rifle of his. Magnanimously, you let it slide.  
  
“Caegar for your thoughts?”  
  
The question draws him back into his own head, and he fiddles with his glasses; Jade is clearly already rubbing off, however long ago she joined this strange cadre of theirs. It’s hard to tell, in the bubbles. “That,” he finally says, kicking up pale water with the side of his foot set against the spray of the wake, “looks an awful lot like a city down there.”  
  
“Prospit, actually!” Jade chimes in, with that special… satisfied timbre, like a schoolfeeder who’s been patiently waiting you to answer a question _all along_ and is just _tickled_ that you finally picked up one of her carefully laid breadcrumbs. Half genuine pride, half smugness. It’s the exact kind of tone that hooked you half-pitch for her in the first place (she, for her part, found the novelty and the challenge of spooky alien vacillation to be exciting, which made it worse), though she and Eridan had been driven towards something like pale, as mysterious as that is to you.  
  
“What, like the fuckin’ moon?”  
  
Jade leans against the mast and crosses her eyes at him. “No, like the dog food company. Yes, Eridan, it’s a whole lot like the moon.”  
  
“Oh, good, I was afraid we were goin’ to accidentally stumble on somethin’ that makes sense here eventually.”  
  
“That can’t be Prospit,” you cut in, drawing your shoulders up. Leaning back on the heel of one hand, you look up at Jade, still carefully working over the sail. “Pike, unless half our session was seariously holding out on us.”  
  
Jade lifts and drops her shoulders in an unaffected shrug. “I dunno, I’m just the bespeckled messenger! I don’t know if it was supposed to happen, or if this is something that really happened in the other sessions at all. All I know is I saw something in the clouds about it once… haha, that’s kind of funny… isn’t it? Like what if it’s just some self-fulfilling prophecy?  I had a vision about it because we’d be here, and I have a memory of it because I had a vision about it.” She pauses thoughtfully, looking out on the ocean as if seeing it for the first time. “It does kinda look like the white part of a chess board though, doesn’t it?”  
  
“Real literary, it’ll be headlinin’ in my slam poetry anthology the moment I figure out how to use a fuckin’ typewriter post-mortem.”    
  
You snort, rolling your eyes and knocking one of your knees against his. Silently you do concede that it looks like a section of a chess board. It isn’t entirely creamy white, like you thought at first glance; it’s more like an opal than a pearl, with subtle undertones of color, reflecting the glass patterns overhead.  Jade pilots you (you decide to drop the fact that there’s clearly no wind, it’s clearly, erm, space magic?) to rest above one of the shapes you noted earlier. It’s closer to the surface than anything else you’d seen so far, nearly scraping the underside of your boat, and--  
  
Well! That’s certainly a plot twist. It definitely looks like one of the tips of the towers from Derse, except from here, you can tell it’s gold.  
  
Jade kneels at the side of the boat, tying it off to some kind of purchase on the tower. “So we’re going swimming, yeah?” She asks in a way that suggests an answer.  
  
You and Eridan exchange looks—this time, you can _tell_ what he’s thinking, and he’s wondering what the hell that water’s going to do to either of your gills. But, hey, you’re dead already, right? Might as well have fun with it—these are your dreambubbles, after all, you’re the one that intervened with the elder gods on behalf of the other players. So your fins cant to the side in something like a seadweller-style shrug, and you kick off into the water before your orphaner has time to run his mouth too objectionably.  
  
The water isn’t as warm as you expected. It isn’t as cold, either. It feels like… nothing in particular, you suppose—like bathwater, but almost not quite as substantial. Your gills flare, and, to some relief, they take in the water just as easily as they would the oceans back planetside; the flowy skirt of your godtier fans out behind you as if in parody of your respiratory tissue.  
  
It takes a moment for you to get your bearings. Beneath the surface, everything is gold; you can see it so much more clearly now, glittering spires and archways that look almost like Derse (there, the obsidian to Prospit’s opal reflected everything like polished black glass). It twinges a nostalgia that you almost don’t feel like you have an ownership of—in your session, you’d woken up on the dreaming moon fairly quickly, but it hadn’t lasted long. But the swimming is a flying that you’re accustomed to, a flying that is much less unsettling than the feeling of nothing beneath your feet. Eridan, catching up to your heels, seems to agree—he always seemed so positively miserable zipping around the darker kingdom. Your poor boy is most assuredly afraid of heights.  
  
Jade, for her part, is keeping up the best she can. It’s clear she’s accustomed to the water, though she’s tucked her glasses away in some invisible pocket, and the way she’s squinting has you letting out a few giggly airbubbles out of one set of gills. But she isn’t a seadweller, and you wait for her partway down the tower. You flick your fins at her in a bemused way, a _totally_ righteous pitch taunt that would probably be lost to the woes of interspecies communication.  
  
Or, not, because, uh, she’s gripping your shoulders, now, and you’re kissing, okay, that’s--  
  
Your gills inadvertently flare as she takes in a breath through your secondary respiratory system, and you immediately shift from flustered to mock-offended. She _used_ you! For your oxygen! Double rude!  
  
Jade gives you one of those stupid gap-toothed grins and dives deeper.  
  
You follow.  
  
Eventually, the pair of you get tired of letting Jade set the pace, and you snag one of her hands, Eridan claiming her other set of fingers in a silent agreement. Exchanges between orphaners and their heiresses often don’t require words; sometimes, apparently, squishy human scientists can be tucked neatly into the fold. Together, you tug her down deeper into Prospit, skimming along gilded-brick streets. Every couple of minutes or so, Jade tugs you into another kiss, and you only answer in turn with fangs a _couple_ of times.  
  
(Eridan gets a couple too, for good measure.)  
  
You find little Prospit apartments (and peer inside, it feels a little voyeuristic aside from the fact that you never do run into a single carapacian), and little Prospit castles (the remnants of the White Queen’s court tugs on a nostalgia that you _do_ feel ownership of, even if it’s from a future that you never got a claim to), and little Prospit municipal buildings (smells like democratic engagement!). It’s all refracted and reflected, just slightly, through the murky tint of white and highlights of other bursts of color. It looks, for all intents and porpoises, like a rolling, underwater fog.  
  
Even though Jade is the filling in a tuna sandwich, she ends up being the one guiding you both. With subtle nudges and tugs, she brings you winding through the broad cityscape—it’s incredible, really, how well she has the entire moon mapped out entirely from memory.  
  
If you had any conception of time here, you’d say several hours slip by pleasantly. Jade never tires of stealing kisses, and, eventually, she gets fewer and fewer accompanying fangs. After a few passes through the center of the city, she even fashions a cape for herself out of one of the waterlogged banners attached to a pillar in town square, and it flutters behind her shoulders—Eridan looks proud, or something. At an abandoned street corner café, all three of you play at a normal date, and you even pull out a stool for Jade to pretend to sit on, “sipping” out of an empty teacup.  
  
Eventually though, you find yourselves all drifting back up towards the surface. It isn’t immediate, but you meander back through town, passing over the same municipal buildings, castles, and apartments. The boat is exactly where you left it, but before you breach the surface, you test out one last thing—when Jade kisses you next, you hold your breath, and she doesn’t seem to notice, apparently (from your perspective, at least) sucking in a lungful of water. You clamp your gills shut against your sides and try taking a breath in through your nose without them to confirm it—dreambubble water is governed by dreambubble logic.  
  
“You could breathe the whole damn time!” You say accusingly, the moment you haul yourself back up onto the boat. Eridan, wringing the water out of his shirt, glances over with an expression of genuine confusion and then realization, his shoulders curling inwards a little with silent laughter, the absolute ass. _Now_ he gets that real jab with your elbow, and, to your satisfaction, even has the courtesy to wince.  
  
Jade looks like the picture of innocence, retrieving her glasses from her pocket and polishing them against her newly-crafted stupid banner cape. “Well, yes?”  
  
You kiss her again under the glass sky, and this time, give her the full treatment of every single one of those fangs. She doesn’t seem to mind much. Neither does Eridan.  
  
The three of you have found happiness—real happiness—in the bubbles, whether the game ever intended you to have it or not.


End file.
